The Promise at the Center
Rev Dr Mark Porizky
2/4/07
1
Corinthians 15:1-11
Now
I would remind you, brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel, which
you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it fast --
unless you believed in vain.
For
I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died
for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was
raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared
to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred
brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen
asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to
one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.
At the center of the Christian faith stands the resurrection of Jesus
Christ. We sometimes forget that and think that Easter should be celebrated only
once a year. But actually every Sunday—the first day of each week—celebrates
the empty tomb. And apart from
Christ raised from the dead there can be no Christian faith.
Paul knew that. In his great chapter on the resurrection of the dead,
which is now preserved for us in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul makes this statement:
"If Christ has not been raised your
faith is futile and you are still in your sins." If God has not raised
his Son, as the New Testament tells us he has, then there is no basis for our
Christian faith. We have not been restored to communion with our God. The
Christian Church is preaching an illusion. And we might as well just give up all
of our Christian activity and proclamation and go do something else. The
Christian faith stands or falls on the resurrection of its Lord. Jesus Christ
risen from the dead is the central tenet of our belief.
Most of our culture recognizes the central importance of the
resurrection. When Easter rolls
around in March or in April, the crowds stream into the church doors. To be
sure, there are those among them who come just to show off their new clothes and
there are many who have not the foggiest notion why they are there. But I wonder
if it is not some common, deep-seated hunger that drives us all to the church on
Easter—some longing to hear that our final foe, death, has been defeated.
"The last enemy to be destroyed is
death," writes Paul, and certainly any religion that cannot deal with
death is not worth its salt. For death is the one door closed forever, the one
obstacle we human beings have never been able to overcome. And so we go to
church on Easter Sundays hoping that someone has overcome death's barrier for
us.
Oh, to be sure, the church's proclamation of the resurrection has its
enemies these days, just as it had its enemies in the time of Paul—those
post-Christian people who are telling us that Easter morning never really
happened; those supposedly
rational, common-sense souls who scoff at our childish beliefs, and who seem
incapable of becoming like little children in their trust, the trust needed
enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Indeed very often, even though faithful Christians believe in the
resurrection, some of them have a rather narrow view of just what it means. Some
of them see it as only a guarantee of their own personal immortality. And so
perhaps for all of us, we need to examine the event more closely.
Let's put the resurrection in the form of a contrast, friends. Let's ask
it this way: What would it mean for you and me and for all the world if Jesus
Christ were not raised from the dead, if there really were no resurrection with
its triumph and empty tomb? What would it mean if we were clutching a lie to our
hearts, if we were finding joy and living day by day with what turned out to be
an illusion? What would be the consequence of walking by a faith that has no
basis in fact?
Paul says that we would be of all persons most to be pitied and indeed we
would be. For if Christ has not been raised from the dead, and there is no
Christian Gospel, no Easter good news, then there is nothing more to this world
than that jungle out there on our city streets. For persons without that
victory, evil and violence and vulgarity are just going to have their way, until
they slowly destroy all that is lovely and pure and innocent, and society comes
crashing down around the heads of our children and grandchildren. If Christ has
not been risen from the dead, if people cannot be assured of that, then they had
better get busy therefore looking out for number one. If
life is to the ruthless and strong, then never mind who gets hurt in the
scramble. It is the guy who is shrewd and knows how to take care of himself who
is going to survive the battle.
Jesus loved people, someone could reason, but look what it got him; He
got nailed to a cross for his compassion. Let's not make the same mistake and
end up poor and dead. And that is the life-style this weary world is left with
if Jesus Christ was not raised from the grave.
No resurrection means that death has managed to kill forever the
goodness, the love, the justice of the Son of God.
If the resurrection has not taken place, then it also is precisely as
Paul says it is—all faith is futile. There is no meaning to our history. There
is no guiding hand. There is no loving purpose being accomplished, no divine
plan being worked out. You and I and all folk are just living out our 70 or 80
years, pouring out our work, our care, our love and suffering for a world going
nowhere at all, for an evil joke called human life, perpetrated by chance.
Do you realize what that would mean if the Christian promise of
resurrection is simply a lie, or a foolish wish?
Think of how many gentle, gracious lives would have been faithfully lived
in vain? Imagine the many Christian martyrs who gave their blood for no cause at
all? Cringe for the many sufferers who bore their pain patiently for naught? How
many common prayers have been echoed futilely through the reaches of an empty
heaven?
For you see, if Christ be not risen from the dead, then there is no goal
to life at all. We shall all simply fall off the edge of time into the black
hole of void. There will be no face of a loving Master waiting for us there, no
countenance shining with the radiance of the knowledge of God's glory. There
will be no voice to say to a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or to a Martin Luther King,
Jr., or even to you and me, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
Inherit the kingdom prepared for you." If Christ be not raised from the
dead, the face at the end is the mask of death.
Worse still, if Jesus Christ is not risen, then there is no forgiveness
from the Father. Christ's compassionate prayer for us from the cross,
"Father, forgive them for they know not what they do"—that prayer
has been heard by no one, and it reflects no heart of divine love, for if Jesus
is not raised there is no God of triumphant goodness and we are still in our
sins.
And can you imagine what it would mean not to know any forgiveness in a
world such as ours? Never to know any pardon for those multitudinous evils of
our society in which we are daily implicated? Never to experience any grace
toward our own personal failures? Never to have the chance of starting over, in
a new beginning? Never to be able to escape the guilty burden of a past which
can only be done away by God?
Early last Sunday morning, a tragic car accident took the life of one of
Fitch’s high school students. I
read in the paper on Monday that the Father of that young man said the
following: “God must have needed a
good new angel.”
Without the resurrection, that father is simply deluding himself.
Can you imagine what it would be like to be without God and to live as a
parent with no hope? Not only to lose one's child forever!—but never to know
any final forgiveness, never to have any heavenly Father who knows what a
child's death is like, to bend over one and to wipe away the tears and to ease
the aching heart, never to have any day when the past is pardoned and a new
beginning is given?
And that is what we all are left with if there is no truth to that story
of Christ raised from the grave, that story written there in the Scriptures by
the God and Father who has forgiven us all our evil—all our sin, all our
shortcomings, all our terribly human mistakes.
Not to know and trust Christ risen from the dead means finally not to be human, for it means really that there is nothing and no one beyond this world to whom we owe our being, our life. If God did not have the power to conquer the grave, then he had no power to create in the beginning, for surely a God defeated by death could not make the wonders we find in this universe, much less the amazing creatures we call human beings.
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But it is in fact as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians, isn't it? In fact
Christ has been raised from the dead. In fact, Jesus Christ lives and now dwells
in our midst as Lord. You and I know those things—despite all our failures in
the church, we know them to the depths of our being. And we know them precisely
because God has come to us in his risen Son and spoken to us through his Word.
He has spread out his table before us. He has nourished our lives with His
merciful message. He has filled our cup to running over with His incarnate Word
of love.
We now know from where we came and to whom it is we are going. We now
experience God's forgiveness in Christ as our daily bread. We now live in hope
by his promise of a final kingdom, the promise at the center of our lives.
We trust that God will be the final word, and all evil and pain, all
sorrow and suffering will be done away forever.
Oh yes, good Christian friends, the resurrection is true. It is the one truth that underlies all other truth in this world of ours. It is the one fact that makes our life worth living. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
He is risen!
He is risen indeed!
Will you pray with me now?
St.
Andrew Presbyterian Church,
Web Site: WWW.SAPC-CT.ORG
Office Email: OFFICE@SAPC-CT.ORG
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